Why do certain websites have difficulties having "quotes" or commas, or anphersands (&)?

Question

I have found this problem on myspace. Whenever I write an "&" symbol, it comes out like this, from my profile: "Ghostworld, Dumb &; Dumber" A semi-colon was added after the "&" when I did not add it.

Here is another example from gamefaqs.com:

beware—not all battles are won by force. The most obvious solution is rarely the right move. Shatter the chains and release the Order’s

I'm sure that others sites make simular mistakes. But why are these mistakes made when the author has not included the changes?

Answer 1

Another example - until recently, questions with a & in them here on Answers auatomatically sorted themselves into Hockey, and questions with a % or a few  other marks in them never got submitted.

This is caused by the special use of some punctuation in the programming languages. For example, the left and right arrows usually enclode HTML tags. The & is used to join strings of text (that is why you are getting strange messages), the " is used to enclose items being looked up in an SQL database, and commas separate lists of items but should not cause problems, because of their frequent use in normal text.

These are all actually faults, because any area where you are allowed to insert text should be "insulated" or isolated, so nothing in that text area is taken and read as computer code. Some versions of the PHP language are particularly buggy in this regard.

You can see the difference, where on gamefaqs.com the & gives you a string of nonsense text, whereas on Myspace a ; is inserted after the &, to disable its effects.

All you can do is learn which characters cause problems in any one software, and avoid using them.